Poland Set to ‘Soon Overtake Britain in Military Strength And Income’

Britain is on course to becoming a ‘second tier’ European country like Spain or Italy due to financial decline and a weak military that undermines its effectiveness to allies, a professional has actually cautioned.

Research professor Dr Azeem Ibrahim OBE concluded in a damning brand-new report that the U.K. has actually been paralysed by low investment, high tax and misguided policies that could see it lose its standing as a top-tier middle power at present development rates.

The plain evaluation weighed that successive government failures in guideline and drawing in investment had actually triggered Britain to lose out on the ‘industries of the future’ courted by established economies.

‘Britain no longer has the industrial base to logistically sustain a war with a near-peer like Russia for more than 2 months,’ he wrote in The Henry Jackson Society’s most current report, Strategic Prosperity: The Case for Economic Growth as a National Security Priority.

The report evaluates that Britain is now on track to fall behind Poland in regards to per capita earnings by 2030, which the central European country’s military will quickly surpass the U.K.’s along lines of both manpower and devices on the present trajectory.

‘The issue is that once we are devalued to a second tier middle power, it’s going to be virtually impossible to return. Nations do not come back from this,’ Dr Ibrahim informed MailOnline today.

‘This is going to be sped up decline unless we nip this in the bud and have bold leaders who are able to make the hard decisions right now.’

People pass boarded up shops on March 20, 2024 in Hastings, England

A British soldier reloads his rifle on February 17, 2025 in Smardan, Romania

Staff Sergeant Rai utilizes a radio to talk to Archer teams from 19th Regiment Royal Artillery throughout a live fire range on Rovajärvi Training Area, throughout Exercise Dynamic Front, Finland

Dr Ibrahim invited the government’s decision to increase defence spending to 2.5% of GDP from April 2027, but cautioned much deeper, systemic problems threaten to irreversibly knock the U.K. from its position as a worldwide influential power.

With a weakening commercial base, Britain’s effectiveness to its allies is now ‘falling behind even second-tier European powers’, he warned.

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‘Not only is the U.K. forecasted to have a lower GDP per capita than Poland by 2030, but also a smaller army and one that is not able to sustain release at scale.’

This is of particular concern at a time of heightened geopolitical tension, with Britain pegged to be among the leading forces in Europe’s quick rearmament job.

‘There are 230 brigades in Ukraine right now, Russian and Ukrainian. Not a single European country to mount a single heavy armoured brigade.’

‘This is a huge oversight on the part of subsequent federal governments, not just Starmer’s issue, of failing to purchase our military and essentially contracting out security to the United States and NATO,’ he informed MailOnline.

‘With the U.S. getting fatigue of offering the security umbrella to Europe, Europe now needs to base on its own and the U.K. would have remained in a premium position to in fact lead European defence. But none of the European nations are.’

Slowed defence costs and patterns of low performance are nothing brand-new. But Britain is now also ‘stopping working to adjust’ to the Trump administration’s jolt to the rules-based international order, stated Dr Ibrahim.

The former advisor to the 2021 Integrated Defence and Security Review noted in the report that in spite of the ‘weakening’ of the organizations as soon as ‘secured’ by the U.S., Britain is reacting by damaging the last vestiges of its military may and economic power.

The U.K., he stated, ‘appears to be making progressively pricey gestures’ like the ₤ 9bn handover of the strategic Chagos Islands and opening talks on reparations for Caribbean Slavery.

The surrender of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean has been the source of much analysis.

Negotiations in between the U.K. and Mauritius were started by the Tories in 2022, however a contract was announced by the Labour federal government last October.

Dr Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute defence and security think thank alerted at the time that ‘the move demonstrates stressing strategic ineptitude in a world that the U.K. federal government describes as being characterised by fantastic power competition’.

Require the U.K. to supply reparations for its historic role in the slave trade were revived likewise in October last year, though Sir Keir Starmer said ahead of a meeting of Commonwealth nations that reparations would not be on the program.

A Challenger 2 primary fight tank of the British forces throughout the NATO’s Spring Storm exercise in Kilingi-Nomme, Estonia, Wednesday, May 15, 2024

Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk speak during an interview in Warsaw, Poland, January 17, 2025

Dr Ibhramin examined that the U.K. appears to be acting against its own security interests in part due to a narrow understanding of risk.

‘We comprehend soldiers and missiles however fail to fully envisage the threat that having no option to China’s supply chains might have on our ability to respond to military aggression.’

He recommended a new security model to ‘boost the U.K.’s strategic dynamism’ based on a rethink of migratory policy and threat assessment, access to uncommon earth minerals in a market dominated by China, and the prioritisation of energy security and self-reliance through investment in North Sea gas and a long-overdue rethink on atomic energy.

‘Without instant policy changes to reignite growth, Britain will end up being a lessened power, reliant on more powerful allies and susceptible to foreign coercion,’ the Diplomacy writer said.

‘As global economic competitors intensifies, the U.K. needs to choose whether to accept a strong development agenda or resign itself to permanent decline.’

Britain’s dedication to the concept of Net Zero might be laudable, but the pursuit will hinder development and obscure tactical objectives, he cautioned.

‘I am not saying that the environment is trivial. But we merely can not afford to do this.

‘We are a country that has stopped working to purchase our financial, in our energy infrastructure. And we have considerable resources at our disposal.’

Nuclear power, including the usage of small modular reactors, could be a boon for the British economy and energy independence.

‘But we’ve failed to commercialise them and obviously that’s going to take a considerable quantity of time.’

Britain did present a new financing design for nuclear power stations in 2022, which lobbyists consisting of Labour political leaders had firmly insisted was essential to discovering the money for costly plant-building tasks.

While Innovate UK, Britain’s development firm, has actually been heralded for its grants for small energy-producing companies in the house, business owners have actually alerted a larger culture of ‘risk hostility’ in the U.K. stifles financial investment.

In 2022, earnings for the poorest 14 million people fell by 7.5%, per the ONS. Pictured: Waterlooville High Street, Waterlooville, Hants

Undated file picture of The British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) or Chagos Islands

Britain has consistently failed to acknowledge the looming ‘authoritarian hazard’, permitting the trend of managed decline.

But the resurgence of autocracies on the world stage threats even more undermining the rules-based international order from which Britain ‘advantages tremendously’ as a globalised economy.

‘The risk to this order … has established partly since of the lack of a robust will to safeguard it, owing in part to ponder foreign attempts to subvert the recognition of the true hiding risk they position.’

The Trump administration’s alerting to NATO allies in Europe that they will have to do their own bidding has gone some way towards waking Britain approximately the urgency of investing in defence.

But Dr Ibrahim alerted that this is not enough. He prompted a top-down reform of ‘essentially our whole state’ to bring the ossified state back to life and sustain it.

‘Reforming the welfare state, reforming the NHS, reforming pensions – these are basically bodies that take up tremendous amounts of funds and they’ll simply keep growing considerably,’ he told MailOnline.

‘You could double the NHS budget plan and it will truly not make much of a dent. So all of this will require fundamental reform and will take a great deal of courage from whomever is in power since it will make them undesirable.’

The report lays out recommendations in radical tax reform, pro-growth immigration policies, and a restored focus on securing Britain’s role as a leader in high-tech industries, energy security, and global trade.

Vladimir Putin consults with the governor of Arkhangelsk region Alexander Tsybulsky throughout their conference at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, March 11, 2025

File photo. Britain’s economic stagnation might see it soon end up being a ‘2nd tier’ partner

Boarded-up shops in Blackpool as more than 13,000 stores closed their doors for good in 2024

Britain is not alone in falling back. The Trump administration’s persistence that Europe pay for its own defence has actually cast fresh light on the Old Continent’s alarming circumstance after years of slow growth and .

The Centre for Economic Policy Research evaluated at the end of in 2015 that Euro location financial efficiency has actually been ‘controlled’ because around 2018, illustrating ‘multifaceted obstacles of energy reliance, manufacturing vulnerabilities, and moving worldwide trade dynamics’.

There stay extensive discrepancies between European economies; German deindustrialisation has actually struck services difficult and forced redundancies, while Spain has actually grown in line with its tourism-focused economy.

This remains vulnerable, nevertheless, with residents progressively upset by the viewed pandering to foreign visitors as they are evaluated of cost effective accommodation and caught in low paying seasonal tasks.

The Henry Jackson Society is a foreign policy and nationwide security believe thank based in the United Kingdom.

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